


Disciple

by morganya



Category: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-06-04
Updated: 2004-06-04
Packaged: 2017-10-20 06:57:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/209989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morganya/pseuds/morganya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The empty spaces keep shrinking."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Disciple

Kyan wakes up early out of habit. He stands before his windows and swipes his face with his thumb, getting the blood flowing through the skin, and the sky outside is large and jagged with buildings. He watches the light turn from dark blue to light blue and then finally pink, which is his cue to get ready and stagger down to Starbucks for his iced cappuccino before work.

On the weekends or if he has a day off, he watches the sun come up and then sits on the floor for three minutes, resting on his heels, before stretching into the salutations posture, raising his arms to the sky and leaning backward, looking straight up. He imagines the bedroom flooding with light and warmth, before his back starts to ache and he straightens up.

It's a ritual done on his own time, not quite enough to purify him completely, but it brings the day into focus before he has coffee or smokes a cigarette or goes back to bed. _A little at a time._

"A little at a time," Vodhri Upamanyu had told him. It was just after Kyan had run away from New Orleans and wound up at an ashram in Texas, where he burrowed down for two months while he tried to get the taste of ashes out of his mouth. Vodhri had been in his sixties then, a tall, trim man whose voice had never lost its heavy Mississippi drawl. "You aren't what you do. It takes time to realize that."

"How much time," he'd blurted. He said that a lot, in his twenties. He had the idea that there was a lot for him to do, and that he wasn't up to fulfilling it. The word 'waste' seemed very scary.

Vodhri, to his credit, didn't look annoyed with the question. "The spirit doesn't follow a time table, Edward. Don't try to fit it into one."

"It's not that."

"What is it then?"

"Well..." Kyan shrugged, and the question sounded stupid even before he asked it, but he couldn't help himself. "Well, what if I forget to realize it?"

"Then you're just like hundreds of thousands of other people," Vodhri said. "Judging themselves on what other people see them do. Filled with their own ego."

"So I'm not supposed to worry about that?"

"The point isn't worrying about yourself. It's living. It's action."

"That's what I mean. There's too much stuff to do."

"And you need to do it all, or you'll never be happy."

"Well, yeah."

"Don't weight yourself down, Edward. Try not to think so much." Vodhri put a fatherly hand on his shoulder. "Come work with me in the garden for a while."

Kneeling in the dirt, pulling up carrots and tugging seed-fat tomatoes off the vine, as Vodhri poked at something two feet away from him, was one of the first times that Kyan understood what it felt like to be nothing but body. Feeling his tendons stretch, grit and sticks crunching under his knees, he felt something soften inside him, like water running over rocks, wearing away the sediment.

He's old enough now that he can look back on that time with a tinge of nostalgia. Given enough time, anything can seem idyllic.

He thinks about going back sometimes, if not to Texas then to another ashram, clear his head out, get away from the world for a while. The only thing is, if he's learned nothing else, he's learned that it's not a place to hide from the world, it just teaches you how to live in it. He's not sure he wants to learn that lesson again.

*****

He'd tried to teach Thom yoga, a couple meditation techniques, but Thom was too impatient, too focused on the clear-cut. He likes the concept, just not so much the actual execution. He fires volleys of questions about what Kyan does, where he's been, how he learned. Kyan finds it all rather endearing.

Thom gets inside other people's heads, and Kyan doesn't think he means to do it, he's just endlessly fascinated by anything that isn't part of him.

Kyan stands in the middle of his living room, Thom sitting on the couch with captivated eyes, and runs through simple postures, more like modified stretches, really, his legs spread in the triangle posture, arms straight out, turning to the left, bending at the waist. He imagines he can see himself through Thom's eyes, that he's nothing but a structure of flesh and muscle.

Kyan's not sure if he does this for Thom or just for himself.

*****

Kyan gets samples from every skin care company on the planet. He tries to keep them all consolidated in one place, but they're taking over the bathroom and threatening to spill out into the rest of the apartment, what seems like hundreds of thousands of half-empty bottles and tubes and containers.

He tests them out on Thom sometimes, ostensibly to make a decision over whether to use them on the show, but really because Thom likes it when people pamper him. He lies like an invalid on Kyan's couch, head tilted back, hands folded across his stomach. Kyan ministers to him, saying, "Tell me how this feels," as he massages moisturizer into Thom's temples.

"I like this stuff better than that rosemary gook you had the other time," Thom says with his eyes closed, skin soft and shiny.

"Rosemary's good for impurities." Kyan uncaps a tube of eye cream, a new company, based out of New Mexico. Kyan likes it because it smells faintly of green tea, barely a scent at all. He squeezes it onto his ring finger and dots it around Thom's eyes.

"Impurities, nothing. I felt like a leg of lamb."

Kyan sighs and pats Thom's chest. "The best is wasted on you, my friend."

"If you say so." Thom laughs. "You know, I could never spend the day just staring at other people's faces. All those pores coming at you all the time."

"It's not that bad," Kyan says. "It's good for karma. Helping people help themselves."

"We should all be so noble."

"Nobility has nothing to do with it."

"Probably true," Thom says. "It's all narcissism, right?"

Kyan is thinking of Vodhri telling him, _Edward, don't get sucked into your own ego._ "No, it's not that, really..."

"You get in because you love what you do, you keep doing it because other people love you for it. That's why, right? Get loved for who you are."

"It's work," Kyan protests. "It's not _who you are._ "

Thom opens his eyes. Light glints off the cream, turning it into a smear of pearly kohl. "Ky, you think it's that easy to tell the difference?"

*****

Thom tells him that he lives like a monk. "It's unsettling. I walk in and there's no artwork, no rugs, nothing. Do you want to come with me and I'll help you pick out some stuff? I know you're, like, not into the fancy stuff so much, but, you know...Free of charge, it's like a gift."

Kyan thinks of saying that he actually had a lot less stuff when he was younger, because it just hadn't mattered then. He'd been too busy trying to get from one place to another to accumulate much, and when he started to settle down, he'd tried to keep that mindset, keep himself from being weighted down by his own stuff. It was good to come home from work and walk into his own clean, well-lighted room.

He doesn't know when things started to creep up on him.

It bothers him when he thinks that he's been traveling backwards. He thinks that the scared, searching kid he'd been was closer to enlightenment than the man he is now.

Or maybe that's just the ego talking again.

Either way, he keeps turning Thom down, and he knows that it has to hurt Thom a little. Thom wants to fill every empty space in Kyan's life. The problem is, the empty spaces keep shrinking, and it's too hard to explain why these days he doesn't feel like he can breathe.

*****

Clutter is a symptom. Your life gets knocked out from under you, and all you're left with is half-empty bottles and tubes and containers, spreading like black mold through your apartment, threatening to crawl up the walls till they reach the ceiling.

Kyan stands in front of his windows, his spine forced into a curl and his arms raised as the sun rises, hoping that the light and warmth will push everything else from view.

All the sun does is illuminate the way he lives now.

He could get away from it all, somehow, he thinks, not forever, that's impossible now, everyone knows who he is and he's got commitments to take care of, God, how did it get to the point when everyone knows who he's supposed to be? But that's not the point, he still could, take a day off, go to the Botanical Garden in the Bronx and chill out. Just to remind himself that there is such a thing as silence.

Thom would like it, too, just not for the same reasons; he would love the way the Rock Garden is laid out, how seamlessly glade turns to meadow turns to woodland. Thom has always been more practical than he is.

He wonders if there's a way to make Thom see what he sees, if he could sit Thom down by the pond and make him still for a few moments, sit by his side and listen to him breathe.

Except he sees the way it would go: Thom reaching out to fill the space between them, and Kyan responding despite himself. Thom tempts without knowing that he's doing it. If Thom would lay warm fingers on the curve of his wrist, it's entirely likely that Kyan would forget where he was.

He imagines Thom being so close Kyan can feel breath on the back of his neck. Would he pull Kyan close, whisper in his ear, "Come on, Ky, live a little," as Kyan forgets to look at the reflection of evergreens in the still water of the pond, or would he just throw his leg over Kyan's hip, pressing him into the stone ground?

Thom would never bother himself about anyone who might pass by and see them; Thom loves shock value, anything that works to disrupt the peace. And Kyan's not as steadfast as he once was.

Kyan sees himself unable to make a sound when he grinds against Thom's hips, unable to hear anything but Thom's breathing and low siren song in his ears, unable to feel anything but himself, overflowing.

Kyan blinks the fantasy away and draws his apartment curtains against the incoming sunlight.

He sits in the middle of his living room and lifts his arms to the ceiling, holds his arms up until his palms grow hot and needles shoot down his shoulders. He tries to keep his head up, to keep from dropping his arms and putting an end to what's really only nerve pain. He keeps his eyes closed and tries to wait until he can remember the presence of his body for a couple of minutes.


End file.
